Appropriate Responses

     The nation is agog over a major terrorist act, this one on our soil. The Left is paralyzed over the slaughter of one of its mascot groups by a member of another. Our supposed president is straining to blame it on guns. The major media are twisting themselves into pretzels to evade any mention of the terrorist’s “religion.” And of course, organizations such as CAIR are bellowing about the hazards of “Islamophobia.” But none of that requires explanation.

     The prevailing reactions among ordinary Americans are fury and grief. The motivations of the terrorist are pellucid as air. Moreover, they’re shared by the great majority of his co-religionists. We sense the acceleration of danger. We want something done...but the powers that be are apparently determined that nothing shall be done.

     What those in power fail to realize, whether willfully or out of ignorance, is that the longer America waits to take effective action, the more likely that action will be wholesale – indiscriminate. The greater will be the number of nominal innocents who will suffer or die...though, in all candor, I must admit that in my opinion, merely holding to the pseudo-religion called Islam seriously taints the claim of innocence.

     As Misha has written, once a nation admits Muslims, they will proliferate like cockroaches. Shortly after that, the violent fraction among them will use the numbers of those otherwise inclined for shelter, concealment, and support, as their religion dictates. And every terrorist act will be swiftly followed by pleas for “tolerance” and demands for concessions to their creed, by both private and public institutions.

     There is no evading the central truth of the matter: Islam promotes violence against non-Muslims and subversion in non-Islamic countries. Muslims should never have been allowed access to any Western nation. It might be impractical – not to say illegal under American law – to round up all known Muslims within our borders and deport them. But the cries from the custardheads that we “mustn’t” deny Muslims the “right” to immigrate to the United States are maddening beyond belief. They increase not only the probability of further terrorist acts within the U.S., but also the likelihood of an eventual, very bloody reprisal.

     In light of which I present the following snippet of fiction:

     The room to which Sumner brought him was nearly a hundred feet square, high-ceilinged and as brightly lit as an operating theater. Yet it was empty of everything but people: Marines in BDUs, and twelve naked middle-aged captives, hands bound behind them, their swarthy faces uniformly filled with fear. At each captive’s elbow stood a Marine with a nightstick. Another dozen Marines armed with M-16s flanked the group.
     The captives’ faces were quite recognizable. They’d been splashed across the country by innumerable newscasts and newspapers. Nolan paled as the implications struck home.
     The walls were dotted with capped fittings, evenly spaced. They might have been for wiring harnesses or hoses; Nolan couldn’t tell.
     The floor was smooth, seamless concrete. It had been smoothed more carefully than any concrete Nolan had seen before, giving it a texture akin to porcelain. Its sole feature was a large sewer drain at the room’s center. When his eyes lit on it, Nolan noticed that the floor was slightly pitched, perhaps half a foot lower at the drain than at the walls.
     It was clear what the room had been designed for.
     Sumner sauntered up to the captives and looked each in the eyes. Each one’s expression went from terror to wonder, and then to outrage, as he recognized his host. They started to scream in a mélange of Middle Eastern tongues.
     Sumner let it go on for a few seconds, then drew a deep breath and shouted a single word, in a parade-ground blare that would have made any drill sergeant proud.
     “QUIET!”
     The gabble ceased at once.
     “You all speak English. You recognize me, and you recognize one another. But you do not yet recognize that the world has changed.
     “That is why you’re here. That is why I’m here with you. Before you leave this place, you will know the change, and you will bow before it.”
     One of the captives spat a stream of obscenities. Sumner nodded to the Marine at the captive’s side. The soldier cracked his baton across the gibbering man’s midsection, doubling him over and sending him to his knees. Sumner waited while the Marine hauled the captive back to his feet.
     “Do not presume on my benevolence, gentlemen,” Sumner said. “It should be obvious by now that I have none. None for you, at any rate.
     “All of you are heads of Islamic states. All of you are complicit in the funding and operation of terrorist gangs. All of you have blood on your hands, probably more than anyone will ever know. So I have had you brought to me.”
     Sumner’s voice was level and unstressed, but Nolan could see the special gleam in his eye, the glaze over his features, that presaged a dramatic action.
     What could be more dramatic than kidnapping twelve heads of state?
     “My operatives killed everyone around you. Their count was eleven hundred sixty-seven fatalities. That was by my order. I wanted there to be enough carnage to drive the lesson home. But the lesson is not yet complete.
     “In a few hours you will be going home. The same infiltration teams that snatched you will be tasked to return you, in full darkness and by the same methods. Whoever is in your palaces when you return will die. What happens after that will be for you to decide.
     “I have had you brought here to hear a sentence of death. At the next terrorist act by any group that has received even one dollar’s worth of assistance from any of you, that sentence will fall. Do not doubt that I will have it carried out.”
     The silence was so perfect that Nolan found himself listening to his own heartbeat. Sumner’s gaze raked across the faces of the captives.
     “But the sentence will not be for you. It will be your families who will die, from your next of kin all the way out to your grandparents, your grandchildren, and your second and third cousins. You will be left entirely without relatives.
     “If that lesson fails to produce the effect I want, and another Muslim commits another terrorist act, I will have you brought to me again. But we won’t convene here. You will go to my War Room, where we’ll watch the saturation nuclear bombing of all twelve of your countries. I will leave you as the sole remnants of your people, your languages, and your cultures. Then I will return you to them. You will rule over nations of corpses and radioactive rubble, to survive as best you can.”
     Sumner smiled. “Do you have any questions?”
     One of the captives in the front row croaked a single word. It might have been “oil.”
     Sumner nodded. “Oil, yes. A very important commodity, doubt it not. But America has its own, and Europe and Asia can learn to do without it. Anything else?”
     “Why?” the same captive said.
     Sumner cocked his head. “Because I’m sick of you, your posturing, your fanaticism, and your savagery. Because you’ve killed enough, and hated enough, and brutalized enough to damn your entire civilization. Why else? Or did you mean why now? After all, Americans have been killed in other attacks by the groups you’ve sponsored, and nothing like this happened.” Sumner breathed deeply, and suddenly seemed to double in size. “Because my wife was in Geneva last night, and when that bomb went off no one knew where she was. Do you need more explanation than that, Mr. Prime Minister?”
     Silence.
     “Very well. You will now be returned to your palaces. Have a nice day.” Sumner strode at once for the door, with Nolan behind him.

     [From an as-yet-unpublished novel.]

     In case the moral of that story isn’t perfectly clear, I will now spell it out:

If peaceable Muslims won’t restrain and discipline violence-inclined Muslims, it will be done for them, possibly by wholesale slaughter.

     The day when Americans will demand such a slaughter as President Sumner has prescribed is fast approaching. Those who would prefer to avert it had better get their heads out of their asses while time remains to them.